Kraepelin, Emil

Our understanding of the clinical cause of schizophrenia has evolved considerably in the last 20 years. Until the 1980s, Emil Kraepelin s notion that schizophrenia is a neurodegenerative disease basically went unquestioned. What we now call schizophrenia, Kraepelin called dementia praecox, literally precocious dementia. He believed that the illness followed a progressive downhill course and culminated in dementia. It later became clear that not all schizophrenia patients follow this deteriorating course, but the neurodegenerative concept of the illness continued for years to hold sway. 

The identification of this illness in modern psychiatry began with Kahibaum, who described catatonia Hecker, who described hebephrenia and Emil Kraepelin, who described dementia praecox (1,2, 3 and 4). 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist divided severe psychiatric disturbance into two conditions dementia praecox, which became known as schizophrenia, and manic depression. 

Since the 1950s, the psychiatric community has had the benefit of antimanic and antidepressant medications to treat manic-depressive illnesses. These medications were developed using the work of Emil Kraepelin, a German physician who wrote about mental illness in the late nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century. Kraepelin had carefully noted distinguishing symptoms among mental patients and had followed the course of the various illnesses in many of them. He was the first to distinguish what he called dementia praecox, now called schizophrenia, and was able to differentiate this illness from manic depression. 

Emil Kraepelin publishes his Psychiatric, Ein Lehrbuch (A Textbook of Psychiatry). He systematizes psychiatry with a new diagnostic scheme defines two major psychoses— manic-depressive insanity, which tends to improve and recur spontaneously, and dementia praecox, whidi tends toward progressive deterioration. 

Quoted in Emil Kraepelin, One Hundred Years of Psychiatry, p. 152. 

One Hundred Years of Psychiatry by Emil Kraepelin. Philosophical Library, 1962, New York. Reprinted by permission of Philosophical Library, Inc. 

German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856 - 1926), circa 1910. (Getty Images)... 

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